Final Exam (1981) Directed by Jimmy Huston
There is a communal argument that slasher aficionados hold regarding Jimmy Huston’s Final Exam. The common consensus -or arbitrary final verdict- is that Final Exam is not one of the most boring slashers made during the genre’s busiest era, but the most boring slasher of them all. Although I consider myself part of the audience that relishes the brainless science behind the exploitation methodology of American slashers, this time I must dissent with the general consensus among fans in employing the hollow argument found in the fallacious “boredom” commentary to pigeonhole this slasher as the dullest of the bunch. Technically, I don’t think it’s a boring movie, unproductive and sluggish maybe it is, but it’s far from being the most soporific slasher, the issue is not in its mechanics, to tell the truth it plays very well its role of being a cheesy and haphazard rip-off of better slashers, the problem is found in its characters’ prose, all the characters in Final Exam are lifeless and disingenuous. The latter is what gives the overall feeling that this is a dreadfully tedious slasher.
As a horror flick it’s a fiasco, on that I guess we can all agree, but strictly speaking as a slasher film it’s just another lousy movie in a subgenre that spawned more trashy movies than any other subgenre of horror. Jimmy Huston’s screenplay purports to be the most literal knock-off of John Carpenter’s Halloween ever made. By this I don’t mean that it is a facsimile of Carpenter’s babysitter killer yarn, Final Exam is far from being a narrative mimicry of Halloween, but I do imply that Jimmy Huston pretty much repurposes -in a very shoddy fashion- the artful formalism of Halloween. The tracking shots, the shadowy slasher killing without apparent motive, point-of-view shots of the killer discreetly driving a car, the minimalist architecture of the killings, and the repetitive, eerie score. In formal matters, Final Exam embodies a faux-Halloween-style formalism. This blatant formal inspiration doesn’t make Final Exam a better film, but at least it reveals what it wants to be or what it’s aiming to accomplish. Both content and form are dysfunctional in narrating a derivative story in this botched slasher endeavor, yet its artsy, mannerless style does lend a certain validity to its clichéd canvas. Therefore, the only blemish to be severely lambasted is the content, which undoubtedly boasts some of the most obnoxious characters in slasher fare.
Final Exam’s plotless story is about stereotypical characters – you’ve got the virginal girl, the bimbo sexy blonde girl, the oddball nerd, and the moronic frat boys – all students at a college where an apparent cold-hearted mysterious killer is prowling the campus environs. And there’s nothing more than that in the anemic framework of this flawed slasher tale. However, something very curious happens in its storytelling monotony, Jimmy Huston has the genius idea -sarcasm- of keeping all the killings for the very end of the film. In the hands of any other filmmaker with discernible talent, that bold maneuver could have been a successful tactical device to release the tension in a big, over-the-top, bloody final act; however, the director here is Jimmy Huston, and the result is the opposite of what was desired. But I still don’t necessarily think it’s as bad as many make it out to be. For starters, Paul Lynch’s Prom Night released a year before Final Exam committed the same mistake first, and yet I don’t see anyone trashing Paul Lynch for it. Yes, it’s true that Prom Night has Jamie Lee Curtis and the sporadic appearances of Leslie Nielsen, but it’s still a hopeless debacle, an impossible-to-save slasher. And even though Final Exam rehashes Prom Night’s flaw, at least there’s a certain ironic and macabre pleasure in finally witnessing its insufferable characters being brutally slaughtered.
But what really made me curious about this cinematically insane scheme was its jarring tonal shift across the narrative spectrum. In the first acts, Final Exam is just an assembly of odious bullying against harmless students and nothing more -the vibe is frivolous and schlocky- and when it reaches its climax, Final Exam resumes the patterns of slasher moviemaking and plays at being just that, a murderer slaying youths; there is no plot twist, no motive, just that. Who knows, maybe Jimmy Huston played a terrible prank on us, or his whole movie is a hilarious response to the staggeringly radical opening act of Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders, in which all the killings – with no explanation – occur in the first section of the film. Final Exam goes against Dennis Donnelly’s seventies slasher and does the exact opposite by saving the carnage for last. If you have a keen eye, you might notice The Toolbox Murders poster in one of the school dorms in Final Exam…is that the reference? Whatever it is, that’s where I got this fun speculation.